Wireless bridge between Meraki Switches

[JPaul]

Hello

We have a building with no option to run fibre as landlord will not agree to work being carried out to dig a duct, so we have suggested a Wireless bridge the only issue the team have is that if there is an issue with the bridge which requires repair this could take up to 24 hours to be done causing the office which works 24/7 to be at a standstill.

Is it possible to run 2 wireless bridges over and configure the MS switches to allow 1 to be a backup and block like a redundant fibre would do?

[alemabrahao]

I don't know if it will work as are you thinking about, but take a look at the documentation.

https://documentation.meraki.com/MR/Wi-Fi_Basics_and_Best_Practices/Wireless_Mesh_Networking

[Ryan_Miles]

I would not expect this to work as it's effectively this unsupported topology https://documentation.meraki.com/MR/Wi-Fi_Basics_and_Best_Practices/Extending_the_LAN_with_a_Wireles...

[Mloraditch]

If you are using a non meraki bridge, I would think this would work. Most vendors I've dealt with operate as a layer 2 connection so the switches would consider it like any other set of two cables not in in a LAG.

[JPaul]

Thank you for this my concern is does it block like fibre does or is there any additional config that we would need to use?

[Ryan_Miles]

It would need to be tested, but the other option would be place 2 APs in 2 different networks. Each network would contain one gateway and one repeater. That would keep the repeater assigned to a single gateway AP. No idea how the switch would treat it though. I'd have to set up a lab to test.

[PhilipDAth]

Rather than trenching, could you thrust a cable underground?

Rather then being layer 2 adjacent, could you make the extra building a separate layer 3 domain, put in an MX and Internet circuit, and connect the two together using MPLS?

If you could do the above, but still really want to have a WiFi link, you could consider this topology - but instead of MPLS you configure WiFi to provide an MPLS like link, and run AutoVPN over it as well.

https://documentation.meraki.com/MX/Deployment_Guides/MPLS_Failover_to_Meraki_Auto_VPN 

[BlakeRichardson]

Could you not get two separate internet connections and use a site to site VPN?

[JacekJ]

I don't see why this wouldn't work, it doesn't matter if you use fiber, LAN or radio, its the (R)STP protocol that finds loops in the network and disables redundant paths.

If you set up a wireless link that will pass through all L2 traffic and disable any STP on them, then all STP packets will go via the links, they will act as cables.

So the switches will "think" that they are connected directly and will suspend one of the 4 ports that take part in the communication and if one of the connections break, the other one will take over.

[PhilipDAth]

>I don't see why this wouldn't work, it doesn't matter if you use fiber, LAN or radio, its the (R)STP protocol that finds loops in the network and disables redundant paths.

The bit you assumed is that the MESH forwards RSTP packets.  I am not confident this is the case.

The other question is - can the MESH itself sustain a loop.

[JacekJ]

Totally get you with the MESH network, but the author never mentioned using a Meraki Mesh in the first place.

Wireless bridge is what he said but I see that the whole discussion went into the Mesh direction, which I also hardly doubt that it would work.

A classic wireless bridge would be one of the ways to go in my opinion.

[PhilipDAth]

Agreed.

[Ryan_Miles · Accepted solution]

I tested this topology and the remote switch goes offline as soon as the second repeater is added. It might work if some VLAN pruning were put in place based on some other past testing I've done to get repeaters behind repeaters to work. But I didn't continue testing this because even if I cobbled together a solution it's completely unsupported from an official standpoint.

[PhilipDAth]

Great work @Ryan_Miles .  The answer is definitive now.